Dolphins might have a ‘highly developed spoken language’

The study said dolphins create words by combining and repeating specific pulses with different frequencies, levels and spectrums so they can distinguish words. Other abilities of dolphins include expressing empathy, fear, and love, and recognizing themselves in mirrors. Researchers have found that dolphins change the volume and frequency of sounds in order to form different words and put them together to form a sentence of up to five words.

But new research shows that they can actually have conversations with each other in the same way humans do.

Dolphin Communication Project director Dr. Kathleen M. Dudzinski, who has studied the behavior and communication of the marine mammals since 1990, argues that more is needed for the verbal exchanges to be deemed a language.

Researchers used two dolphins from the Black Sea. However, it was a surprise to see that they are chatting in full sentences. Both in a pool, one of the pair would listen to a sentence without interruption to the other before responding with a string of words as well. There will be more research in the future to discover how dolphins can communicate. These animals seem to be even smarter than we thought.

The new discovery has further shown the high intelligence dolphins possess and hints that they are able to develop a highly developed spoken language much like us humans. Without food rewards, a special audio system recorded the exchanges between the dolphins.

What’s perhaps most fascinating about the interaction is that the dolphins appeared to be keenly interested in what the other had to say, and understood that they had to take turns vocalising to get their meaning across.

Researchers have definitively proven how dolphins communicate with each other by recording a conversation for the first time.

Considering how the whole “polluting their home” thing might be a bit awkward in a conversation, maybe we should take our time on this one. “However, the current weight of evidence suggests that dolphins do not have a language that functions in the same way as human language”, she continued.

He attached electrodes to the brains of living dolphins to stimulate neurons and observed that a dolphin that was about to be brutally killed made loud noises, which he interpreted as attempts to communicate with its tormenters.